


The stars look different

by HeatedHeadwear (SplickedyHat)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 18:28:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3219005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/HeatedHeadwear
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(when you're dead.)<br/>Tavros Nitram watches over the orphanage.  Aradia Megido and Vriska Serket arrive together, but do not leave together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The stars look different

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "mixfic" event I did over on Tumblr, quite a while ago. I completely forgot to post this! The bolded part below was written by tumblr user cosmicshenanigans, and the rest is mine.  
> I didn't tag it as Major Character Death because Tavros is already a ghost at the beginning of the story. Hope that's alright.

**Tavros watched from behind the door as the gaggle of orphaned children were escorted inside. It was girl wielding a wooden pirate sword he took notice of first, she was louder than the others, and held herself with an odd sort of majesty despite her scruffy, second hand clothes. His eyes widened when one of the children, a doe eyed girl, looked towards him with a dimpled smile. No one ever noticed him, even his parents had left eventually. One of the many unpleasant side affects of dying.**

He’d never liked going into other people’s rooms without permission, even as an invisible ghost who could walk through walls, but he had a feeling that the smiling girl would still be awake and he wanted to…see her again?  Talk to her?  Or maybe just confirm that she’d seen  _him_ —the glance had been so fleeting that he was hardly sure it had happened now.

She was awake.  In the bed next to hers, the other girl slept with both arms wrapped around the wooden sword.

"Hi," said the smiling girl.  "You were there when we came in…did you work for the orphanage?"

She had the faintest accent, Tavros thought absently, making his way towards her.  She turned  _orphanage_ into  _orpanage_.  It was cute.

—Wait.

"Uh,  _did_ I?” he asked, brow furrowing.

"Well I don’t know," she said, grinning at him, "that’s why I asked you in the first place!"

 _In de pirst place._ He wondered where she was from.

"No, I mean, why would you ask that, in a, you know, past tense kind of way?  Do you think I don’t work here anymore?  Not that I did!"

She squinted at him, pitying and curious.  ”…Don’t you know you’re dead yet?”

"I—well, yes actually I do!"

"Then why did you ask?"

"Because, okay, I didn’t know that  _you_ knew so I was confused and when I said, uh,  _did I_ , I was asking about the word did instead of, you know, saying your question back at you.  So…”

"You haven’t talked to anyone in a while," she said.  It was a statement of fact, and it hit home harder than he would have expected.

"I was never very good at it even when I was alive," he admitted, scratching the back of his head.  "Sometimes I think people can hear me a little bit when I’m, in a situation where I feel like making them listen, and actually trying…  But it doesn’t happen often."

"Well, I can hear you," she said decidedly.  "We can talk again tomorrow!  But I have to sleep now so good night."

"I, then, good night?" he managed, and stayed only a little longer before realizing maybe she would have a hard time getting to sleep with him there.  He spent the rest of the night roaming restlessly until ending up, as usual, on the roof looking at the stars.

The stars look different when you’re dead.  It’s hard to explain to the living.

—

The smiling girl’s name was Aradia Megido, and she turned out to be from the Philippines.  She was also Tavros’s first friend in at least a couple of decades.  He had a hard time convincing her not to mention him to anyone, frustratingly cavalier as she was in talking about ghosts to her roommates.  

The pirate girl’s name was Vriska, and despite a certain amount of charismatic sway held over the other children, it quickly became apparent she had mainly her own interests at heart.

"She’s mean to you," he told Aradia one day after lunch, settled in a corner of the attic.  "I don’t want to be rude, or anything, but I think, maybe, she isn’t really your friend.  She steals things and hides them and there’s, uh, there’s a lot of stuff hidden under her bed.  And she shouts sometimes."

"That’s what her mom used to do," said Aradia off-handedly, and Tavros felt something tighten painfully in his gut.  "She told me that.  That’s where she learned all the bad words, too.  But she likes playing games as much as I do and I think she does want to be friends, actually."

"…Yeah, maybe," said Tavros, looking at his feet.

—

It didn’t take long for Vriska to start asking why Aradia talked to herself so much.  Tavros wasn’t actually there to hear her say that her best friend was a ghost, but he didn’t need to be.  The rumor spread with incredible speed, never quite reaching the ears of any of the caretakers.

The next time he heard them talking about him, he was behind a wall, listening in, invisible to Aradia for once.  It felt oddly duplicitous, hiding again like a living person who could actually be seen by anyone.

"…sounds like a weak wimpy coward!"

"He’s not!"  That was Aradia, injured and not quite understanding that Vriska didn’t even believe in the person they were talking about.  Tavros had his moments of sympathy for the little girl, never successful in her brash attempts to catch the eye of potential parents, showing off the cigarette burn scar on her arm and claiming it was from some grand adventure, but he could never stand moments like this.

"I bet he can’t even move anything or haunt people like a  _real_ ghost!”

Tavros edged towards the end of the short passage into the girls’ room, suddenly hating the feeling of his heart hammering in his chest.  His body wasn’t even real anymore; if there were any fairness in the world, he wouldn’t have to deal with sweating palms and a churning stomach anymore.

Peering around the corner, he saw Vriska, sitting on her bed with her legs swinging over the edge, and Aradia facing her, arms straight by her sides, her cloud of black curls practically bristling.

"You don’t know that!  He’s a lot braver and stronger than he thinks, and more than _you_ think!  I bet he could do it if he tried!”

As Vriska threw back her head laughing, Tavros edged towards the dresser across the room from the girls.  Aradia’s dark eyes flicked in his direction, and then back to Vriska.  Tavros wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans, pointed at the hairbrush lying on top of the dresser and said, “Maybe she would, uh, believe you if I moved that?”

Aradia raised her eyebrows.

Tavros crossed his arms defensively.  ”Well, it’s, like you said!  I might do it if I try hard enough!  Just tell her to watch, okay?  I’ll…I’ll do it.”

She did, and Vriska did turn to look, albeit with an exaggerated eye-roll.  Tavros flexed trembling fingers, reached slowly towards the hairbrush, and gripped the handle.  It was like trying to lift a ton of cold rock compressed into the shape of a revlon product, but—maybe it was his forcibly renewed confidence—he thought he felt it shift just a little bit.

"This is stuuuuuuuuupid!" said Vriska, her chin propped on her hand.  "Ghosts aren’t real, Megidumb, why don’t we play pretend again instead?"

Aradia glanced at her, scowling, and then turned her head back to the dresser, where Tavros was still hauling desperately at the brush. “Come on, you can do it!  You can do it, Tavros, I believe in you!”

And for just one moment, everything was as light as it had ever been when he was alive, and the brush went flying across the room as Tavros fell backwards onto his rear end.

When he got up, elated and surprised, Aradia was laughing and Vriska…

Vriska was afraid

then angry

and he couldn’t stop the fight that followed.

—

She couldn’t see him after that.  Or if she could, she ignored him so completely that he might just as well have been invisible.

She grew and grew, and she didn’t smile anymore, and Tavros could tell that there was something in Vriska that was desperately, horribly sorry but when she couldn’t fix it she just got angry again.  When she turned sixteen, she ran away.  Aradia hardly seemed to notice.

She kept razors in her desk drawer and sometimes she would take them out and just look at them.  Never used, never gotten rid of.

—

Her healing was a long process but it began with the appearance of a skinny boy named Sollux who talked fast in Tagalog and actually got her to talk back, stumbling over a language she hadn’t used for years.  Tavros watched as she hugged him and cried for the first time since before the fight with Vriska, and felt just a little hope for once.

He found he was able to follow her to her therapy group, where a skinny white lady wearing a white suit and a pink scarf spoke over-earnestly to everyone present but somehow coaxed them into sharing their stories.

There was a girl in red shoes and a scale-patterned leather jacket whose matter-of-fact tone only barely hid the pain when she talked about the relationship she’d just left.  The spiky-haired boy who’d come in with her tried awkwardly to put words around his own feelings and eventually just smacked himself hard in the face as though it were a compulsion and barked, “I just hate myself, okay?  I fucking hate myself.”

The skinny lady’s name was Roxy Lalonde, but after half a year watching the meetings, she was irrevocably stuck in Tavros’s mind as Mom Lalonde, which was what everyone called her anyway.  She called everyone “honey”, brought trays of cookies to meetings (“from this fabulous old lady I know!”) and told stories of her own recovery (“thirty years sober!”).

And little by little, things improved.  But Aradia still couldn’t see Tavros, and never mentioned him even when she told the group about her fight with Vriska.  He wondered sometimes whether she even remembered him, or whether she’d somehow erased his memory from her mind.  

He came to peace with the idea eventually, and was prouder than he could have said to know she hadn’t opened the desk drawer that held the razors in years.

Until, that was, one night after she came home from a meeting, she sat down and opened the drawer.  Tavros stood awkward, paralyzed, in the doorway behind her, unable to do anything about it.  His mind was racing, terror freezing him to the spot.  Hadn’t it been a good night?  Mom Lalonde had brought a pet carrier full of tiny black kittens to visit the group and even Karkat had agreed to hold one.  It had fallen asleep in his lap and he’d refused to move even after the meeting was over and Tavros had thought he’d seen Aradia’s mouth just barely twitch up at the corners.

He’d thought she was almost there.

Watching her, he wondered frantically whether he could move something physical one more time, drag the blades out of her hands and onto the floor—

She looked at them for a long moment, the way she had before when she’d been about to sit and stare at them for hours on end.

And then she threw them away.

Tavros couldn’t breathe.  He watched as she stood up, dusted her hands as though eliminating every trace of the razors on her skin, and then turned to face him.  To look right into his eyes.

Aradia gave him a wide, dimpled smile.

"I’m alive," she said, "and I plan on staying that way."

"I’m, uh, more than totally okay with that," said Tavros.


End file.
